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It’s possible to be flippant here, when Jihadists fly aircraft into buildings they shout God is Great, what do atheists shout when they do it?
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Martin Amis (The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007)
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There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane -- as a means of inciting evil, to borrow the vocabulary of the devout -- there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.
Faith-based violence was present long before Osama bin Laden, and it ill be with us long after his demise. Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara, and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are. In any human endeavor, some fraction of its practitioners will be motivated to pursue that activity with such concentrated focus and unalloyed passion that it will consume them utterly. One has to look no further than individuals who feel compelled to devote their lives to becoming concert pianists, say, or climbing Mount Everest. For some, the province of the extreme holds an allure that's irresistible. And a certain percentage of such fanatics will inevitably fixate on the matters of the spirit.
The zealot may be outwardly motivated by the anticipation of a great reward at the other end -- wealth, fame, eternal salvation -- but the real recompense is probably the obsession itself. This is no less true for the religious fanatic than for the fanatical pianist or fanatical mountain climber. As a result of his (or her) infatuation, existence overflows with purpose. Ambiguity vanishes from the fanatic's worldview; a narcissistic sense of self-assurance displaces all doubt. A delicious rage quickens his pulse, fueled by the sins and shortcomings of lesser mortals, who are soiling the world wherever he looks. His perspective narrows until the last remnants of proportion are shed from his life. Through immoderation, he experiences something akin to rapture.
Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God...
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Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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All the romance of feeling that men in high places are above personal considerations and act only from motives of pure patriotism, and for the general good of the public has been destroyed. An inside view proves too truly very much the reverse. —ULYSSES S. GRANT to WILLIAM T. SHERMAN, September 18, 1867
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Ronald C. White Jr. (American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant)
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When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremists have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans. Faith-based
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Jon Krakauer (Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith)
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There it was again: conscience. Lincoln believed he was acting according to motives higher than the merely political. “The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance,” Lincoln had written to the Quaker Eliza P. Gurney in September. “Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us.
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Jon Meacham (And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle)
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Israeli intelligence, on the other hand, relied mostly on human resources—had countless spies in mosques, Islamic organizations, and leadership roles; and had no problem recruiting even the most dangerous terrorists. They knew they had to have eyes and ears on the inside, along with minds that understood motives and emotions and could connect the dots. America understood neither Islamic culture nor its ideology. That, combined with open borders and lax security made it a much softer target than Israel.
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Mosab Hassan Yousef (Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices)
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Reid was born in 1818 in Ballyroney, County Down, the son of Rev. Thomas Mayne Reid Sr., who was a senior clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. His father wanted him to become a Presbyterian minister, so in September 1834 he enrolled at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. Although he stayed for four years, he could not motivate himself enough to complete his studies and receive a degree. In December 1839 he boarded the Dumfriesshire bound for New Orleans, Louisiana, arriving in January 1840. Shortly afterward he found work as a clerk for a corn factor
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Thomas Mayne Reid (Complete Works of Captain Mayne Reid)
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In the light of the evidence it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism. Given their knowledge and expectations and the economic climate in which they lived, the disposal of assets to invest in the fairly remote possibility of settlement in the East would have been a stupid gamble. It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalize about them, that they were moved by an idealism which must have inspired not only them but their families. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children had to face a long absence and must have worried about them: in 1098 Countess Ida of Boulogne made an endowment to the abbey of St Bertin 'for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem'.83 And they and more distant relatives — cousins, uncles and nephews - were prepared to endow them out of the patrimonial lands. I have already stressed that no one can treat the phenomenal growth of monasticism in this period without taking into account not only those who entered the communities to be professed, but also the lay men and women who were prepared to endow new religious houses with lands and rents. The same is true of the crusading movement. Behind many crusaders stood a large body of men and women who were prepared to sacrifice interest to help them go. It is hard to avoid concluding that they were fired by the opportunity presented to a relative not only of making a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem but also of fighting in a holy cause. For almost a century great lords, castellans and knights had been subjected to abuse by the Church. Wilting under the torrent of invective and responding to the attempts of churchmen to reform their way of life in terms they could understand, they had become perceptibly more pious. Now they were presented by a pope who knew them intimately with the chance of performing a meritorious act which exactly fitted their upbringing and devotional needs and they seized it eagerly.
But they responded, of course, in their own way. They were not theologians and were bound to react in ways consonant with their own ideas of right and wrong, ideas that did not always respond to those of senior churchmen. The emphasis that Urban had put on charity - love of Christian brothers under the heel of Islam, love of Christ whose land was subject to the Muslim yoke - could not but arouse in their minds analogies with their own kin and their own lords' patrimonies, and remind them of their obligations to avenge injuries to their relatives and lords. And that put the crusade on the level of a vendetta. Their leaders, writing to Urban in September 1098, informed him that 'The Turks, who inflicted much dishonour on Our Lord Jesus Christ, have been taken and killed and we Jerusalemites have avenged the injury to the supreme God Jesus Christ.
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Jonathan Riley-Smith (The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading)
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About two weeks later, on September 10, 2005, O’Kelly died of a pulmonary embolism. What O’Kelly realized, in the shadow of his final days, was the extraordinary power of a moment. He wrote: I experienced more Perfect Moments and Perfect Days in two weeks than I had in the last five years, or than I probably would have in the next five years, had my life continued the way it was going before my diagnosis. Look at your own calendar. Do you see Perfect Days ahead? Or could they be hidden and you have to find a way to unlock them? If I told you to aim to create 30 Perfect Days, could you? How long would it take? Thirty days? Six months? Ten years? Never? I felt like I was living a week in a day, a month in a week, a year in a month. Now, take a second look at the beginning of O’Kelly’s memoir, especially those final two words: “I was blessed. I was told I had three months to live.” That opportunity to live was why he felt blessed. Shouldn’t we share his zeal for moments that matter? We may have more time to live than he did, but should that be a reason to put them off? This is the great trap of life: One day rolls into the next, and a year goes by, and we still haven’t had that conversation we always meant to have. Still haven’t created that peak moment for our students. Still haven’t seen the northern lights. We walk a flatland that could have been a mountain range. It’s not easy to snap out of this tendency. It took a terminal illness for Gene O’Kelly to do it. What would it take to motivate you to create a Perfect Moment?
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Chip Heath (The Power of Moments: Why Certain Moments Have Extraordinary Impact)
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Remember that for a man like Tony Blair, this was the biggest decision of his political life. He was not just a voter who supported the war, he was a prime minister who had gambled his career on the conflict, committing troops on the ground, of whom 179 would lose their lives. His political reputation, to a large extent, hinged on the decision. If anyone would be motivated to defend it, he would. So, let us explore the contortions. On 24 September 2002, before the conflict, Blair made a speech to the House of Commons about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: ‘His WMD programme is active, detailed and growing,’ he said. ‘Saddam has continued to produce them, . . . he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes . . .
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Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth About Success)
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Of the two dozen spies or so deployed to Britain between September and November 1940, five were German, while the others were variously Dutch, Scandinavian, Cuban, Swiss, Belgian, Spanish, and Czechoslovak. These were far removed from the superspies imagined by a nervous British public. Most were poorly trained and petrified; some spoke no English at all and had only a sketchy notion of the country they were supposed to blend into. They did not look like your next-door neighbor—they looked like spies. Only a few were genuine Nazis. The rest were variously motivated by greed, adventure, fear, stupidity, and blackmail. Their number included several criminals, degenerates, and alcoholics. According to one MI5 report, “a high proportion suffered from venereal disease.” Some had opportunistically volunteered to spy against Britain, with the intention of defecting. Some were anti-Nazi from the outset. This motley collection of invasion spies had only this in common: not a single one escaped detection.
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Ben Macintyre (Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies)
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Roland Bainton in his effort to make the best of Luther declared that Luther's view of the Jews "was entirely religious and by no means racial."'`' True; the crackpot version of social Darwinism that gave rise to "racial" anti-Semitism was a creation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luther hated the Jews because they rejected Christ. But his fury was no less cruel and vicious because its underlying motives were different or because his suggestions for carrying his cruelty to some final solution were less comprehensive and efficient.
His fury culminated in his vicious book of 1543, On the Jews and Their Lies. In late 1542 Pope Paul III had issued a call for the great reforming council to assemble at Trent beginning in 1545. It was to become a Catholic and papal triumph. What Trent would become was unclear in 1542, but Luther could see clearly enough that it represented a defeat for the evangelical cause. Through these years his attacks on foes of all kinds became even more vulgar and inflammatory because, as Heiko Oberman has said, he felt his work threatened on every
Personal issues may also have been an influence. His beloved daughter
Magdalena died in his arms on September 20, 1542. Afterward his grief was intense, and he spoke feelingly of the terror before death while affirming his trust in Christ.-'' This combination of woes may have driven him to lash out at someone, and the Jews were there, testifying to his worst fear, that Jesus had not risen from the dead, and that Chrisitians would enjoy no victory over the grave. Whatever the cause, his outrageous attack in On the Jews and Their Lies represents one of those rhetorical horrors that may be explained in the various ways that we explain the cruelties that human beings inflict on others when the tormentors feel their own place in the universe threatened with annihilation. Yet explanation cannot finally excuse the horror.
After raging against the Jews for dozens of pages of tedious vehemence, Luther recommended what should be done with them: Their synagogues should be burned down; their books should be taken from them, "not leaving them one leaf"; they should be "forbidden on pain of death to praise God, to give thanks, to pray, and to teach publicly among us and in our country"; and they should "be forbidden to utter the name of God within our hearing."22 Christians were guilty for not taking vengeance against the Jews for having killed Christ and for having killed innocent Christians for three hundred years after the Crucifixion, for not "striking them to death."23
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Richard Marius (Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death)
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was flying by, and if she couldn’t find a way to forge bonds between her granddaughters, Mamaw knew that come September, Sea Breeze would be sold, the girls would scatter again, and she’d be sitting on the dock howling at the harvest moon. The previous May, Mamaw had invited her three granddaughters—Dora, Carson, and Harper—to celebrate her eightieth birthday at Sea Breeze. She’d had, however, an ulterior motive. In the fall, Marietta was putting Sea Breeze on the market and moving into an assisted
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Mary Alice Monroe (The Summer Wind (Lowcountry Summer #2))
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Glenn Hammond Curtiss was a bicycle enthusiast before he started building motorcycles. Although he only attended grammar school to the 8th grade, his interests motivated him to move on to greater things. In 1904, as a self-taught engineer, he began to manufacture engines for airships. During this time, Curtiss became known for having won a number of international air races and for making the first long-distance flight in the United States. On September 30, 1907, Curtiss was invited to join a non-profit pioneering research program named the “Aerial Experimental Association,” founded under the leadership of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, to develop flying machines. The organization was established having a fixed time period, which ended in March of 1909. During this time, the members produced several different aircraft in a cooperative, rather than a competitive, spirit.
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Hank Bracker
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What motivated me to write was a pale September, walking to and fro from school, a hail shower in Swaziland, a forest of flowers, autumn in Port Elizabeth, the falling of the leaves, the wind in the trees, the golden threads were caught up and that ran in my sister's hair, children caught in poverty, abandonment, neglect, malnourished with their distended bellies, the weight of driftwood, seawater, fish and chips with my mother after our walk on the beach, talk of angels in war, drought, famine, hunger, the spitting, thin rain or being drenched by a downpour, harbingers, outsiders and insiders.
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Abigail George (Winter in Johannesburg)
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In the attack on the Jewish community center in Los Angeles that left 5 people wounded, the killer had “scouted three prominent Jewish institutions in Los Angeles as he looked for places to kill Jews, but found security too tight. He then stumbled on the lesser-known North Valley Jewish Community Center in suburban Granada Hills, they say.”17 [His killer] also has admitted stalking [Yitzhak] Rabin on two previous occasions.... [The killer] tried again in September at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new highway interchange, but found security was too tight.18 Each of these brief stories represents a different case where very determined and motivated criminals altered their plans because of increased security.
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John R. Lott Jr. (The Bias Against Guns: Why Almost Everything You'Ve Heard About Gun Control Is Wrong)
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The Government’s repeated response, however, even after October 1938, was to continue to attack his motives and judgement, and to seek to minimize the importance of his information. ‘No doubt it is not popular to say these things,’ Churchill had written to his wife on 26 September 1935, ‘but I am accustomed to abuse and I expect to have a great deal more of it before I have finished. Somebody has to state the truth.’ During
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Martin Gilbert (Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (Volume V) (Churchill Biography Book 5))
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Scriptural determinism” sounds like an arcane academic paradigm, but it is deployed by nonacademics in a consequential way. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as Americans tried to fathom the forces at work, sales of several kinds of books rose. Some people bought books about Islam, some bought books about the recent history of the Middle East, and some bought translations of the Koran. And of course some bought more than one kind of book. But people who bought only translations of the Koran were showing signs of scriptural determinism. They seemed to think that you could understand the terrorists’ motivation simply by reading their ancient scriptures—just search the Koran for passages advocating violence against infidels and, having succeeded, end the analysis, content that you’d found the essential cause of 9/11.
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Robert Wright (The Evolution of God)
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Dr. Fauci continued to insist that fully vaccinating the entire population was the only path to ending the pandemic. This assertion ignored the fact that COVID vaccines prevent neither transmission nor infection, nor reductions in viral loads. Overwhelming science has proven that vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals are equally likely to spread disease. A September 2021 Israeli study demonstrating that natural immunity provides 27x better protection against COVID than the Pfizer vaccine is just one of 29 recently published peer-reviewed studies that vouch for the superiority of natural immunity.29,30 What, then, is motivating the fierce campaign to nevertheless coercively vaccinate the vaccine-resistant 25 percent, other than a strategy to eliminate the control group to hide the deaths and injuries?
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health)
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in September 2019, a parliamentarian named Pia Dijkstra announced that she would push forward an assisted-dying bill designed for elderly people with “completed lives.” When I asked Dijkstra about her motivations, she answered me with typically Dutch blasé: “We think that people have the right to decide, themselves, when their life is complete. They should not have to take actions that are nasty, like putting a plastic bag over your head so you suffocate.
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Katie Engelhart (The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die)
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Multiple raids on emigrant wagon trains in Utah Territory, both before and weeks after September 11, 1857, demonstrate that the train massacred at Mountain Meadows was not the only one attacked. These assaults were motivated by political wrangling over federal and local rule and tensions between church and state that reached a deadly peak in 1857 but roiled Utah for decades. Modern readers may recognize similar tensions today, not only in Utah but throughout the United States. This jostling for power between Latter-day Saints and federal authority continued long after the massacre. Attempts to wield the case as a political weapon resulted in justice delayed—and justice denied—for the innocent victims of the massacre and their families.
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Richard E. Turley (Vengeance Is Mine: The Mountain Meadows Massacre and Its Aftermath)
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September 7, 2011 at 4:04 PM
"THE FORMULA OF LOVE"
by Guru Jahseed on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 5:16pm
WE ARE ALL GROWING AND WE ARE ALL MADE UP OF PURE LOVE BUT SEEMS LIKE BEINGS ARE STILL STUCK IN THIS 2D 3D REALM OF SELFISHNESS, WHEN WILL WE AS ASTRAL LIGHT COSMIC BEINGS SHOW AND REPRESENT OUR TRUE DIVINITY WITHIN, STILL COMPETITION, GREED, SELFISHNESS, MISTREATMENT TOWARDS OTHERS ARE STILL CAPTIVATED IN THE HEARTS OF MANY, LOTS OF BEINGS TALK THE TALK BUT IS STILL AFRAID TO WALK THE WALK, I'VE BEEN EXPOSED TO THIS WAY OF LIVING FOR SO LONG THAT IT SHOULD BE SECOND NATURE BUT WHEN YOU MAKE UP YOUR MIND AND LOOSE ALL ASPECTS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS THERE MUST BE A TRANSFORMATION WITH MIND, BODY, AND SELF THIS TRANSFORMATION ONE SHOULD UNDERSTAND IF WE AS COSMIC BEINGS SAY THAT WE ARE COSMIC LIGHT BEINGS AND THAT WE ARE ASCENDING AND OUR VIBRATION IS AT THE PEAK OF ASTRAL PROJECTION OF LOVE THAN WHY IS THERE STILL DISEASES IN THE HEARTS OF MANY, LETS ALL WALK THE WALK/TALK THE TALK AND SAY WHAT WE MEAN AND MEAN WHAT WE SAY LETS ALL SHOW UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IN WHICH THIS IS THE FORMULA WE ARE BIRTH WITH...
"WHOEVER HOLDS THE FORMULA OF LOVE HOLDS THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE
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Stephen Jahseed Lark (Tell The World: Understanding Oneself)
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MISPLACEMENT OF BEINGS"
September 11, 2011 at 3:24 PM
THERE ARE GODS OF SPORTS(MICHAEL JORDAN)
THERE ARE GODS OF MUSIC (MICHAEL JACKSON)
AND THERE ARE EVEN GODS OF WAR (AMERICA)
"THIS IS NECESSARY"
THIS GALACTIC COSMIC UNIVERSE IS CONSTANTLY EXPANDING, AND EVOLVING MORE AND MORE STARS ARE BEING BIRTH TO ANNOUNCE THEIR EXISTENCE FOR WE ARE ALL APART OF THIS NEVER ENDING PROCESS IN WHICH WE CALL LIFE WEATHER WE ARE AWARE OF THIS OR NOT WE ARE ALL, AS SPACE CAN BE DEFINE AS THE DNA OF GOD WE ARE THE INTELLECT OF THE COMPLETE SOURCE IN WHICH WE AS LIGHT BEING SHOULD EXPRESS THIS KNOWLEDGE BUT THE FACT THAT SOME STILL WILL NOT EXPRESS OR IS AFRAID OF WHAT THEY MIGHT LOOSE IS IS A STRIKING TO ONES HEART KNOW WHO YOU ARE....LOVE,TRUTH,PROSPERITY
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Stephen Jahseed Lark (Tell The World: Understanding Oneself)
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Women have come a long way , since that day on September 7th 1968 , when they burnt myriad symbolic feminine products , including mops and bras , as a mark of protest . The women wanted to call world-wide attention to women's rights and women's liberation !
Today women are making headlines each and every day as the makers and creators of positive change in all walks of life . Be it as doctors , pilots , engineers , artists , writers , musicians, innovators, teachers , astronauts , researchers, managers , private or government employees , designers , scientists , dancers, singers, entrepreneurs , architects , bus-drivers , nurses , chefs , actors, athletes , politicians , or home-makers , women have been and are continuing to prove themselves that they are equal to or better than men in all walks of life !
A big 'Salute ' to all the women in the world !
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Avijeet Das
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At Oaktree, we strongly reject the idea of waiting for the bottom to start buying. First, there’s absolutely no way to know when the bottom has been reached. There’s no neon sign that lights up. The bottom can be recognized only after it has been passed, since it is defined as the day before the recovery begins. By definition, this can be identified only after the fact. And second, it’s usually during market slides that you can buy the largest quantities of the thing you want, from sellers who are throwing in the towel and while the non-knife-catchers are hugging the sidelines. But once the slide has culminated in a bottom, by definition there are few sellers left to sell, and during the ensuing rally it’s buyers who predominate. Thus the selling dries up and would-be buyers face growing competition. We began to buy distressed debt immediately after Lehman filed for bankruptcy protection in mid-September 2008 as described on page 235, and we continued through year-end, as prices went lower and lower. By the first quarter of 2009, other investors had collected themselves, caught on to the values that were available, and gathered some capital for investment. But with the motivated sellers done selling and buying having begun, it was too late for them to buy in size without pushing up prices. Like so many other things in the investment world that might be tried on the basis of certitude and precision, waiting for the bottom to start buying is a great example of folly. So if targeting the bottom is wrong, when should you buy? The answer’s simple: when price is below intrinsic value. What if the price continues downward? Buy more, as now it’s probably an even greater bargain. All you need for ultimate success in this regard is (a) an estimate of intrinsic value, (b) the emotional fortitude to persevere, and (c) eventually to have your estimate of value proved correct.
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Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side)